1.2.1.12 What do you really, really, really want? Really?

I was in America once speaking at a large network marketing conference and during a break in sessions I went to get a coffee. (Whenever I’m away, I always go looking for a good espresso!) I was on my way to the coffee shop when a rather large African-American gentleman came up to me and asked me if I had any change. I said to him, “Do you want change or do you want dollars?”

He looked at me, surprised, and said, “Are you jivin’ me, man?”

“No, I’m not jivin’ you,” I said. “I want to know what you really want.”

“I want to get some food,” he replied.

“Oh, so you really want food?” I said.

“Yeah, I want to buy some food. I figure if you’ve got some change I can get myself a sandwich,” he explained.

I said, “I’ll tell you what, how about I buy you your whole meal?”

This idea seemed to appeal to him. “Yeah, alright man!” he said, “You from Australia?”

“Yes.”

“I always wanted to go to Australia.” (Now there’s a millionaire mindset—he couldn’t afford a meal, but he dreamed of flying to Australia!)

So I took the man to a deli and bought him a whole heap of food. Then I gave him $10. He thanked me and we went our separate ways.

The very next day, I was in the lobby of my hotel when another man came into the lobby and approached me. “You got some change?” he asked me.

So I said, “Do you want change or do you want dollars?”

“I want to get some food,” he said.

“Great!” I replied. “Let me take you down to the deli and I’ll buy you a meal.” (By then I knew where the deli was!)

He said, “No, no! Just give me the money!”

Now, I was born at night, but not last night, so I said, “No, no, no! If you want food, I’ll buy you food.”

“I just need some change, man!” he replied.

Again I asked him, “Do you want change or do you want dollars?”

“I just want some money,” he said, getting frustrated. Then he walked away.

I watched him as he walked out of the hotel lobby and approached a lady outside who happened to be one of the conference delegates. He asked her for some change and she offered him some food—a sandwich and some fruit that she had just bought. Incredibly, he refused it, saying, “No, I don’t want it!”

Funny, isn’t it, how you can think you want something, but when it’s offered to you, you knock it back because you really don’t know what you want. What do you really want? So often we don’t know the answer to this simple yet fundamental question. Many of us declare, “I don’t know what I want, but I know what I don’t want.” This won’t get you anywhere. You need to know exactly what you want in life and be able to articulate it and base your life decisions on that knowledge.

Rocky, Rocky, Rocky…

In their book The One Minute Millionaire, Mark Hansen and Robert Allen relate the story of Sylvester Stallone’s struggle to get his first major film role:

Nothing will happen until you decide to prosper

Stallone knew what he wanted and was seemingly prepared to make any sacrifice in order to get it. If you want to prosper, you have to focus on what you want.

You have to make a choice; you have to make a decision. Nothing happens in life until you make a decision. Your decision could be:

• I’m going to commit to becoming prosperous!
• I’m going to commit to creating wealth!
• I’m going to commit to building a great business!
• I’m going to commit to building a house!
• I’m going to commit to having a family!

What do you want? You’ve got to choose. The singer Gloria Estefan once said, “We seal our fate with the choices we make.” What choices have you made about the kind of life you want to have? If you don’t know what you want, how will you recognize what you want when you see it? If you’re single and you want to be married, have you chosen what kind of spouse you want?

I once had a client who wanted to get married. One day I asked her, “What kind of man do you want?”

She replied, “Oh, anyone will do. At my age you can’t be too choosy.”

We were sitting in a café and I pointed to a rather large and disheveled character seated at another table. “What about that guy over there? The toothless hairy one,” I suggested.

“Oh no!” she quickly replied, “I wouldn’t want someone like him.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s one ruled out. So, what kind of man do you want?”

Sometimes we just haven’t taken the time to think through what it is we actually want.

If you’re married, let me ask you this: What kind of marriage do you want? Every marriage has a culture, a personality (some marriages have the personality of a war zone!). What kind of personality do you want your marriage to have? Every bank account has a personality too. Businesses are the same. Is the personality of your business one of wanting to grow, to increase, to prosper, to invest, to gain knowledge, and to learn? Apply this question to every important area in your world: What kind of business/career/marriage/family/home/lifestyle… do you want?

Sometimes we just haven’t taken the time to think through what it is we actually want. We think we kind of know what we want, but we struggle to articulate it. This is a very basic starting point for developing a millionaire mindset. It’s really not a difficult question. It’s not rocket science. Life is so simple, you have to go to university to mess it up!

What do you want in life? You have to choose. What car do you want to drive? Where do you want to live? Don’t go straight to “I can’t afford it”. Sylvester Stallone couldn’t afford to turn down a $20,000 offer for his script (let alone $330,000!). Making up your mind is the first thing. The rest is about time, decision-making, planning, input and growth. But if you don’t know clearly what you want, how will you ever get there?

Financial problems or head problems?

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs convinced one-time Pepsi CEO John Scully to take the helm of Apple by asking him, “Do you want to sell sugared water the rest of your life, or do you want a chance to change the world?” Jobs forced Scully to take stock of his present situation and to think about what he really wanted from life. Don’t settle for a ‘sugared water existence’ when in your heart of hearts what you really want is to change the world. My friend, if it’s a mist in your mind, it’s a fog in your world. If you aim for nothing, then you’re bound to hit it!

About a year ago I was doing some consulting for a rather large real estate firm. They asked me if I would do a mentorship program with some of their top sales agents and I grasped the opportunity because I figured it would present an opportunity for me to learn from them as well. I met with one of their agents who, as soon as I walked into the room, I could tell had some real issues. I immediately assumed he was a heavy smoker because of the stench coming from his body. And I also knew he had an alcohol problem, again because of the telling odor. What I did not know was that this man had a financial nightmare on his hands. To my surprise, as we began to talk I concluded after about 30 minutes that this guy was a huge income earner. As a matter of fact, he was earning half a million dollars in net income each year. Yet, he looked at me and said, “I have a financial problem.”

When I began to dig deeper and ask questions, I soon discovered that this gentleman had a $35,000-a-month gambling habit. He also had an incredible alcohol problem. As well as that, he was a prolific user of cocaine. This guy did not have a financial problem. He had a discipline problem and he could not see it. He couldn’t see that his problem wasn’t money, it was that he couldn’t discipline his addiction. So often you and I assume we have a financial problem, when in reality we may instead have a vision problem, or we may have a priority problem, or we may have a spending problem—we buy things we don’t need and we can’t afford because we want to impress other people.

You’ve got to ask yourself: What is the real cause of my lack in life. You see, sometimes the problem you think you have is not the real problem. A problem well defined is a problem almost solved. If you can’t define your real challenges that are hindering your prosperity, you’ll never prosper. It could be a mindset. It could be your upbringing. It could be the culture you were brought up in to believe that money is evil.

The hardest question you’ll ever answer

What do you really want in life? I recently put this question to a group of real estate professionals. These people were high-income earners. Their response to my question was that it’s a very hard question to answer. I disagreed. You see, I know what I want in life, and if I can figure it out, so can you. I want to prosper. I want to create wealth. I want to help other people become wealthy. I want to help people who are disadvantaged go to another level, and to do that I need money. Some years ago I was in Orange County, California, and I was asked to visit a young man who was about 19 years of age and dying of HIV. As I approached the hospital ward I could hear the sound of something gasping for breath. It sounded more like an animal than a human being. As I got closer, I discovered that the sound was coming from this young man I was about to visit. AIDs had completely ravished his body.

When I walked into his room, what was meant to be a 19-year-old young man looked like a 95-year-old man. His hair had fallen out and he had lesions down one side of his face. His eyes were shut tight and his face was black and blue. This was merely a skeleton of what was once a strapping, handsome, athletic young man. He was having difficulty breathing and, once the nurse helped him to sit up, we were introduced. Then I asked him, “Steve, how are you doing?”

In a sad, husky voice he replied, “Not good.”

I asked him if the medication was helping.

“No, it’s not helping me,” he said. Then he looked at me a little confused and said, “A minister came in here yesterday and prayed for us all to get healed.” “Steve, did anybody get healed?” I asked. You see, I believe in miracles. I’ve seen some miracles in my time. You may not believe in miracles, but you are a miracle!

Through his one eye that was open, and with a look of sadness, anger and confusion, he said, “No, man. Nobody got healed.”

I then blurted out the dumbest question I have ever asked in my 47 years on this planet: “Steve, don’t you want to be healed?” What a dumb question to ask a 19-year-old guy, whose life had been savaged, ravaged and eaten away by this hideous disease!

I’ll never forget what happened next. He turned to me, one side of his face looking battered and bruised, one eye shut tight, lesions down one side of his face. On the other side of his face his skin was clear and healthy. His one open eye turned beetroot red as he looked at me. Tears formed and fell down his cheek. “No, sir,” he said. “I don’t want to be healed. I just want to be loved!”

At least Steve knew what he wanted. The question is: do you? I made sure that for the remaining few weeks of his life Steve was surrounded by friends and members of our community. I made sure he was embraced by the love he so desperately craved.

What a tragedy that most people go through life and cannot articulate in a sentence what they really desire. A wise man once said, “He who is everywhere is actually nowhere.” What do you really, really, really want? Can you honestly define it? Can you specifically say what it is? Or is it some pipe dream or something you read in a magazine or saw in a movie? If you can define what you want, it will be a lot easier to obtain.

What does your world look like?

I used to run programs to help rehabilitate drug addicts and we had an 86 percent success rate. The theme of our program was ‘turning nightmares into dreams’. We graduated around 400 young men from heroin addictions, cocaine addictions, ‘ice’ addictions, and so on. After they graduated, I would ask them, “What does your world look like when you leave here? What does your future look like when you get out of this program?” They would reply, “Well, I’m free of drugs, I’m happy, I’m getting on with my mum and dad, and my mum’s hugging me…” These boys had to define what they wanted before they could leave the program. You see, once you make up your mind what you want, the choices you make thereafter are much simpler. You and I would surely agree that if those boys couldn’t see their future, rest assured that their drug dealers could! They had to beat them at their own game.

I remember one day a lady came into our facility and I asked her if I could help her.

She said, “I’ve come to pick up my dream.”

It didn’t immediately occur to me what she meant, so I said, “You’re here to pick up your dream?” (I thought that perhaps she was interested in me!) “Yes,” she said. “My son, Robbie. He came in here nine months ago and he was a nightmare. Now he has graduated. He has become a dream. Where is he? Where’s my dream? Where’s my boy?” Such beautiful, positive, uplifting words!

The only thing we really had to do with some of those guys was to get them to think differently. There are plenty of detox centers in my city with a low 14 percent success rate. The truth is, we don’t have a drug problem, we have a vision problem. Young people with a hope, a future and a destiny do not inject drugs into their veins. I am of the opinion that a clear vision of your future will inspire you to put up with any pain in the present. Ask any Olympian who has won a gold medal and they’ll tell you the same. The joy of the gold medal causes all the pain of past training to fade away into insignificance. A mother giving birth to a child will put up with nine months of weight, struggle and morning sickness. And when that child is born, the overwhelming joy pushes into the past all the pain of pregnancy and birth.

I believe most people get so busy and stressed wondering how their plans are going to happen rather than simply focusing on the purpose for their plans and believing that they actually will happen. You see, if you have a reason, you’ll find a way. So often in life people don’t find a reason because they are so inoculated from the pain of their past that they can’t see any way that their plans will come to fruition. So the first port of call for a prosperous mindset is to clearly define your why—your purpose and your dream.

Adults sometimes tell young people, “Don’t expect much out of life” or “Well, your father was an alcoholic so what else would you expect?” or “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” This kind of mindset displays nothing but lies that rob people of their future. I can assure you that I fell a long way from my family tree! I was sling-shot out of my tree! But it didn’t stop me from realizing my dreams.

I said at the beginning of this book that I want to help make people rich. And one of the steps towards that goal was to start a club, which I have now done. My dream is that through this club I will be able to help 10,000 people become millionaires, or at least to help them start thinking like millionaires. You too can become a part of this club. (See the back of this book for more details.)

If you haven’t decided what you want, then there is no point having a plan. People often start planning before they’ve figured out what they want, but it doesn’t work that way.

“I’m planning for my future,” someone may say.

“What does your future look like?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” they say.

“Then how can you plan for it?”

My friend, if you’re planning to play a game of football, but you don’t know where the game is being played, how can you possibly turn up to play? If you don’t know where the goalposts are, how can you score?

CHALLENGE: Make up your mind—what do you want?

Pause for a moment and ask yourself these questions:

• What do you want?
• Do you want to prosper?
• Do you want to create wealth?
• Do you want to build a great business?
• Do you want to have a loving family?
• Do you want to give lots of money to people in need?

To help people work through these questions, I often use focus sheets. I ask people, “If your life was a blank canvas in front of you, what would you want to put on it?” It’s amazing how many people don’t know.

Now, if I was to give you a blank canvas and I asked you to close your eyes and paint a picture in your mind of what you’d like your life to look like, what would you paint? What’s your family like? What are your kids like? What is your career like? What is your world like?

If your world was ideal, what would it look like? How would you think? How would you feel? How would you speak? How would you live?

You need to know what you really, really, really want. If you don’t make up your mind, your unmade-up mind will make itself up for you. Don’t get to the end of your life and wonder, How did I get here? Everybody ends up somewhere, whether they mean to or not. Make sure you end up somewhere on purpose. When you know what you want, then you can start to make your plans.